Monster-sized trucks sweeping across 1,100 acres in blinding snow with a dizzying amount of blue, white and red ground lights as their only signposts.

This is the business of keeping the airfield at T.F. Green Airport clear during a snowstorm.

Charged with keeping one runway open as long as humanly possible regardless of the weather, the airport Tuesday unleashed its stable of giant plows, sweepers and blowers to keep up with the storm’s dry, bitter cold snow.

All through the night about 30 pieces of heavy equipment will work relentlessly to clear the 1˝-mile main runway over and over again.

“People think that the airport closes, but we never really do,” said Alan Andrade, manager of operations for the Rhode Island Airport Corporation. “The carriers may decide not to fly, but we stay open and we have to keep that runway clear.”

The airport never knows, he said, if a plane needs to divert to Green from somewhere else, and it’s not unusual to see a jet make an unscheduled landing in the middle of a snowstorm.

Wind and precipitation are factors that the airlines consider when deciding whether to ground planes, said Andrade, who has been with the Airport Corporation about 21 years. But, he added, there’s another key factor and that is friction.

While the plows and blowers are churning up and down the runway and the taxiways, special trucks take units of measure that let them know what the stopping conditions are on the runway and if they meet standards set by the Federal Aviation Administration for making a safe landing.

“I always think about the people who might be up in a plane wondering where they might be diverted to [because of a storm],” Andrade said. “This is why we do what we do.”

From the window of Andrade’s office on the third floor of the airport terminal, the roughly 30 trucks that make up his “snow patrol” look almost graceful as they move in what looks like swirling formations, cutting around each other with ease.

From the ground, and inside a truck cab, it’s a lot more daunting and dizzying.

This is snowplowing on steroids with some of the trucks outfitted with plow blades that are 22 feet wide.

And then there’s the snowblower trucks that can chew up 5,000 tons of snow per hour and are lit up inside like a pinball machine with levers, gauges and switches.

Paul Poirier, equipment and vehicle training officer for the Airport Corporation, was behind the wheel of one of the snowblowers, making it look easy.

“This is something else … it’s not regular snowplowing,” he said, as he worked controls that governed the blower chute, the front tires, and the rear tires, which have a separate axle.

All the while, fans were blowing in the cab, wipers were working overtime on a windshield the size of a picture window, and multiple radios were crackling with messages from the ground crews and the air traffic control tower.

Like the rest of the crew, Poirier had been at work since early Tuesday morning and didn’t know when he’d get home.